The Underground Map

The Underground Map is a project which is creating street histories for the areas of London and surrounding counties lying inside the M25.

Baker Street

In a series of maps from the 1750s until the 1950s, you can see how London grew from a city which only reached as far as Park Lane into the post war megapolis we know today. There are now over 85 000 articles on all variety of locations including roads, houses, schools, pubs and palaces.

You can begin exploring by choosing a place from the dropdown list at the top.

As maps are displayed, click on the markers to view location articles.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence

Click here to explore another London street
We now have 666 completed street histories and 46834 partial histories
Find streets or residential blocks within the M25 by clicking STREETS

JANUARY

2018

Cissbury Ring South, N12
Cissbury Ring South is one of the roads of the Woodside Park Garden Suburb. The founder of the Woodside Park Garden Suburb, Fred Ingram, built more and more roads and houses, retaining the character of the earlier developments. Walmington Fold, Lullington Garth and Chanctonbury Way grew outwards from the original nucleus and Poynings Way, Steynings Way, Saddlescombe Way, Cissbury Ring, Pyecombe Corner, Folkington Corner, Wolstonbury, Offham Slope and Rodmell Slope also materialised.
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JANUARY

2018

Heathcote Street, WC1N
Heathcote Street is in the north-east corner of the Foundling Hospital estate, leading from St George’s Gardens to Gray’s Inn Road. It was named after Michael Heathcote, Governor of the Foundling Hospital from 1810

A gate once stood here to bar access to Mecklenburgh Square, in an attempt by the estate to make this a more desirable residential area.

Its remaining houses were mainly destroyed in the Second World War
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JANUARY

2018

Shepherd’s Bush Place, W12
Shepherd’s Bush Place was formerly known as Providence Place. Geograph mentioned Shepherd’s Bush Place as a "remarkable local survivor, hard by Shepherd’s Bush Green and now also Westfield Shopping Centre and the new Central Line station..."

Most of the street still has the original Victorian terraces lining it.
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JANUARY

2018

Prince Albert
Originally called the Albert Tavern, the Prince Albert public house is a three storey building dating from 1866-68. It was extended in 1871 and is attributed to the architect Joseph Tanner. The building is symmetrical about the corner with four bays to Albert Bridge Road and four to Parkgate Road of the same architectural composition of four round headed windows to first and second floors with rendered arches linked to capitals. The ground floor is glazed red faience whilst upper floors are yellow stock brick.

It is now the oldest building on Albert Bridge Road.
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JANUARY

2018

Rose Croft Gardens, NW2
Rose Croft Gardens is a cul-de-sac off of Dollis Hill Lane. In the 1920s and 30s new housing estates sprang up in Neasden and Oxgate, which brought thousands of people into the area. In the early 20s the North Circular Road was cut through the middle of the parish, and towards the end of that decade the Nicol Estate was built on its north side, and the Brentwater Estate on its other side. Braintcroft School was opened in 1928, and Wykeham School in 1930.

Neasden Golf Course began to be eaten away in 1926, and in 1929 the contents of the clubhouse were auctioned off. Within a year the golf course was covered by the houses of the “Dollis Park” estate to its eastern boundary at Vincent Gardens. The last country landmark in Neasden Lane, Jackman’s Forge, disappeared to make room for the new shopping parade. A new church hall for St Catherine’s Church was opened in 1928, and the old parish room which had been built in 1907 was demolished.

At the turn of the decade Neasden Recreation Ground was formed, t...
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JANUARY

2018

York Place, WC2N
York Place marks the location of a house on this site. York Place was built on the site in the 14th century for the bishops of Norwich. Demolished in the 1670s, a series of streets were built here commemorating the name of York House’s final owner: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

Before saner road namers got to work, York Place was called ’Of Alley’.
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JANUARY

2018

Dollis Hill Farm
Dollis Hill Farm was situated to the north of Dollis Hill Lane. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Finch family, one of the two important local families, bought up several pieces of land to make the Dollis Hill Estate. This included two farms, with the main farmhouse north of Dollis Hill Lane and the smaller one opposite it on the south. The farms around Willesden were well known for their hay, grown for the horses of London, and there were dairy farms producing milk.

Originally the estate lands were more extensive and a large 17th-century house, rebuilt in 1800, was used as Dollis Hill Farm.

In 1825 the family had enough money to replace the smaller farmhouse with a new house, named Dollis Hill House. Things did not go so well for them after 1850, when Henry Finch lost his lucrative post at the Royal Mint, so in 1861 they moved back into Dollis Hill Farm and rented Dollis Hill House to Sir Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, who later became Lord Tweedmouth.

The farm halted as a working farm in ...
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JANUARY

2018

Neasden
Neasden was first recorded as ’Neasdun’ in AD 939, derived from the Old English neos = ’nose’ and dun = ’hill’. Neasden could be seen for afar as a ’nose-shaped hill’ in its rural past as it had been a countryside hamlet on the western end of the Dollis Hill ridge. The land was owned by St. Paul’s Cathedral. In medieval times, the village consisted only of several small buildings around the green near the site of the present Neasden roundabout.

In the 15th–17th century the Roberts family were the major landowners in the area. Thomas Roberts erected Neasden House (on the site of the modern Clifford Court) in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1651 Sir William Roberts bought confiscated church lands. After the Restoration the estates were returned to the ownership of the Church but were leased out to the Roberts family. Sir William improved Neasden House and by 1664 it was one of the largest houses in the Willesden parish.

During the 18th century the Nicoll family replaced the Roberts as the dominant family in Neasden. In the 19th century these farmers a...
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JANUARY

2018

Gipsy Hill, SE19
Gipsy Hill is the name of the main road that runs from Gipsy Road, near its junction with South Croxted Road, up to Westow Hill in Upper Norwood. Gipsy Hill takes its name from the presence of Gipsies in what was a relatively remote rural area until Gipsy Hill railway station was opened in 1856. On 11 August 1668, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that his wife had visited "the gypsies at Lambeth"; they may well have been located in this area.
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JANUARY

2018

Homestead Park, NW2
Homestead Park consists of twenty one dwelling-houses located on the north side of Dollis Hill Lane. By the time of the First World War the suburban expansion of Willesden along Neasden Lane and Dudden Hill Lane had reached the outskirts of Neasden, which was then a rural village.

Neasden Green incorporated a number of large houses and estates whose owners were resisting the suburban tide. Gladstone Park, on the south side of Dollis Hill Lane and Neasden Golf course to the north were acting as barriers to further development.

The break up of the Neasden estates and the catalyst of development, came in the form of the North Circular Road from Neasden Lane to Edgware Road began which began in January 1921 and was completed two years later. The North Circular Road opened up the Brentwater estate on the north side of Dollis Hill Ridge to housing development in the late 1920s. This period of encroaching development posed its greatest threat to Neasden Golf Club, which began with the selling of a slice of land for housing development in 1926.

E...
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JANUARY

2018

Melrose Avenue, WD6
Melrose Avenue was the first built of Borehamwood’s ’poet’ roads. The ’poets’ roads of Borehamwood were named by David Scott-Blackhall, Chief Housing Officer of the Elstree Rural District Council and himself a published poet.

He wanted to name a road after Sir Walter Scott by calling one Scott Avenue. However, as David’s surname was ’Scott-Blackhall’, he was afraid that people might think he had immodestly named the road after himself.

Therefore it became Melrose Avenue, after Sir Walter Scott’s connections with Melrose Abbey ,in the Scottish Borders.
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JANUARY

2018

Lullington Garth, N12
Lullington Garth is an oddly named road in Woodside Park. In the late 1920s, Mr FCJ ("Fred") Ingram conceived the creation of a new housing estate served by its own cluster of shops and near to Woodside Park station. He began buying land on the western side of the Dollis Brook and as far north as the confluence of Folly Brook with Dollis Brook. He promoted the proposed development as a 100-acre "garden suburb" with a maximum of eight houses to the acre.

He named the new roads after rural areas of Sussex where frequented in his youth. The three-bedroom semi-detached houses were to be of consistent but not uniform design. The roads were to be laid out with ornamental trees and grass verges and the built-up area was to be surrounded by parkland and open fields, with footpath access to the beautiful Totteridge Valley.

Lullington Garth was ultimately named after the village of Lullington in Sussex whereas a garth is the cloister garden of a medieval monastery.
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JANUARY

2018

Wilton Crescent, SW1X
Wilton Crescent is notable for its affluent and politically important list of residents, present and historic. Wilton Crescent was created by Thomas Cundy II, the Grosvenor family estate surveyor, and was drawn up with the original 1821 Wyatt plan for Belgravia. It was named at the time of Thomas Egerton, 2nd Earl of Wilton, second son of Robert Grosvenor, 1st Marquess of Westminster on whose estate the road was built in 1825.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, it was home to many prominent British politicians, ambassadors and civil servants. Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900–1979) lived at 2 Wilton Crescent for many years, marked today by an attributive blue plaque. Akin to nearby developments, Wilton Crescent is characterised by grand terraces with lavish white houses which are built in a crescent shape, many of them with stuccoed balconies, particularly on the southern part of the crescent. The Portland stone-clad, five-storey houses toward the north are high and were refaced between 1908 and 1912 via architects Balfour and Turner. Most of the houses had o...
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JANUARY

2018

Island Gardens
Island Gardens is an area of the Isle of Dogs opposite Greenwich. The 1.12-hectare waterside park at Island Gardnes is notable for its spectacular cross-river view of the classical buildings of the former Greenwich Hospital, the Cutty Sark and the National Maritime Museum, with Greenwich Park forming a backdrop. The northern entrance of the Greenwich foot tunnel is also within the park. It is almost certain that the view from this location is the one that the Canaletto painting ’Greenwich Hospital from the North Bank of the Thames’ is taken from, though whether Canaletto himself actually visited the site is in doubt. The park was formally opened on 3 August 1895 by local politician Will Crooks.

The 19th century name for the area was North Greenwich. It was named for the now defunct North Greenwich railway station (1872), that served a former passenger ferry to Greenwich and stood near the later Island Gardens (1897) and Greenwich foot tunnel (1902).

The park gave its name to Island Gardens DLR station. This opened i...
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JANUARY

2018

Mudchute Park
Mudchute Park and Farm is a large urban park and farm just south of Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs. It is a Local Nature Reserve and a Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation. The name of the site is a testament to the engineering overspill when Millwall Dock was being constructed in the 1860s. Spoil from the excavation of the Dock, and silt from its channels and waterways were dumped on nearby land, using a conveyor system.

The park now covers 13 hectares, and the local authority describes the farm as the largest urban farm in Europe.

The Millwall Dock Company owned a huge swathe of land across the Isle of Dogs as it intended to extend the docks to meet the Thames in the east one day, when there was enough business to justify it. Until then, the company kept the land undeveloped, mostly leasing it out for pasture. This was also the case of the later Mudchute (or ’Mud Shoot’ as it was originally spelled in official documents).

The name "Mudchute" derives from it being the former dumping ground for mud dredged from the ...
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JANUARY

2018

Greenwich Peninsula
The Greenwich Peninsula is bounded on three sides by a loop of the Thames, between the Isle of Dogs to the west and Silvertown to the east.
Formerly known as Greenwich Marshes and as Bugsby’s Marshes, it became known as East Greenwich as it developed in the 19th century, but more recently has been called North Greenwich due to the location of the North Greenwich tube station. This should not be confused with North Greenwich on the Isle of Dogs, at the north side of a former ferry from Greenwich.

The peninsula was drained by Dutch engineers in the 16th century, allowing it to be used as pasture land. In the 17th century, Blackwall Point (the northern tip of the peninsula, opposite Blackwall) gained notoriety as a location where pirates’ corpses were hung in cages as a deterrent to other would-be pirates. In the 1690s the Board of Ordnance established a gunpowder magazine on the west side of the peninsula, which was in operation by 1695 serving as the government’s primary magazine (where newly-milled powder was stored prior to being distributed, on board specially-equipped hoys, to wherever it ...
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JANUARY

2018

Blackwall Tunnel
The Blackwall Tunnel is a pair of road tunnels which pass underneath the River Thames. The tunnel links the London Borough of Tower Hamlets with the Royal Borough of Greenwich, and forms part of the A102 road.

A tunnel in the Blackwall area was originally proposed in the 1880s. According to Robert Webster, then MP for St Pancras East, a tunnel would "be very useful to the East End of London, a district representing in trade and commerce a population greater than the combined populations of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham." By this time, all road bridges in London east of the ferry at Chiswick were toll-free, but these were of little use to the two fifths of London’s population that lived to the east of London Bridge. The Thames Tunnel (Blackwall) Act was created in August 1887, which provided the legal framework necessary to construct the tunnel. The initial proposal, made by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, called for three parallel tunnels, two for vehicular traffic and one for foot, with an expected completion date of works within seven years. It was orig...
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JANUARY

2018

Shroffold Road, BR1
Shroffold Road takes its name from the former Shroffolds Farm. Shroffolds Farm itself was situated in Whitefoot Lane and was owned by the Earl of Northbrook.

The future Downham housing estate was built over the farmland between 1920 and 1923.
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JANUARY

2018

St Michael Queenhithe
St. Michael Queenhithe was a church in the City of London located in what is now Upper Thames Street. First recorded in the 12th century, the church was destroyed during the Great Fire of London in 1666. Rebuilt by the office of Sir Christopher Wren, it was demolished in 1876.

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JANUARY

2018

The back gardens of Hazelbank Road (1915)
The view from the rear of 133 Hazelbank Road in Lewisham across Shroffold’s Farm (1915) While London seems to have surburbanised quickly between the world wars, it actually grew in sudden spurts between housing slumps. There were many slowdowns in building in the nineteenth century and, after the Wall Street crash, a slowdown in the twentieth century too.

Sometimes building speculation would part build an area, leaving gaps for a decade or two where the old farms would carry on.

This was true for areas now considered part of inner London such as Lewisham. Hazelbank Road stretched southwest-northeast but Shroffold’s Farm was still a going concern at the back of the new housing.
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